Effie Gray, Fair Maid of Perth

On the whole the Victorians were a pretty repressed lot. You only have to look at the plants and ornaments they put under glass cases. Lytton Strachey once referred to it as the Glass Case Age. He said it was the result of an innate incapacity for penetration: ‘All enclosed in glass – all physically impotent . . . it’s damned difficult to copulate through a glass case.’
Beginning with previously unpublished letters from Effie Gray’s childhood, Linda Randall has traced the story of the clever little Scots girl who grew up to become known as ‘The Fair Maid of Perth’ and who went on to marry two artistic giants of the nineteenth century: John Ruskin and John Everett Millais.
This is the story of Effie’s marriage to John Ruskin, and how she learned to deal with it.